Hi Sue, I’m really sorry this is happening to you. I’m super confused about curation as well. Some of my best performing articles never got curated and some of my rather not so great ones did!
Lately every single piece has been curated and I can’t explain why because I haven’t changed my writing style or anything. The only thing I did change was to use lots of Medium’s formatting features. Bold and italic writing, subheadings, quotes etc. The more I use these the higher the chances of getting curated - at least in my case.
And even if stories do get curated that doesn’t mean that you’ll get a lot of traffic on those ones. I’ve had curated stories with unter 5 reads.
Good luck to you!